Wulf and Eadwacer
is one of the more cryptic Anglo-Saxon poems. Critics have suggested that it is a Cynewulfian rune-poem, a
canine/lupine love story, a fragment of a Germanic legend, an elegy for a dead
infant son, an elegy for a dead adult son, a charm against wens… the list goes
on. By far the most common translation
is that of a lover’s lament. This makes
it somewhat unusual in the Anglo-Saxon corpus – The Wife’s Lament has similar features, and it can be said that The Husband’s Message is a love-poem of
sorts. Some authors have argued that Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament cannot be the
passionate poems they appear to be because of this rarity, but “the argument founders
on the evidence of the text.” (Klinck 1987). Rare they may be, but we have them.

I became
interested in Wulf and Eadwacer
precisely because it is unusual in the corpus. The general impression of Anglo-Saxon culture that permeates the Society
is one of a Beowulfian warrior-society full of mead halls and theigns and
glittering Sutton Hoo treasures. All
that, surely, was part of Anglo-Saxon society, and an important part. But Wulf
and Eadwacer gives us a view that is at once very different and entirely
congruous. The speaker may be torn by a
heartsick passion that we hardly glimpse elsewhere, but the language used to
describe her reaction to her situation has all of the grim courage we would
expect to find in the mead hall.

The Text

Aside from its content, the poem has several peculiar
features. Only two poems in Old English
contain refrains: Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer, and they appear in
precisely that order together, in the Exeter Book (c. 975). This has lead one scholar to hypothesize that
they are actually part of a larger myth-cycle – that the narrator in Deor is “Wulf” in Wulf and Eadwacer (Frankis 1962). Wulf and Eadwacer also makes
use of half-lines (indeed, the refrain contains one of these half-lines). It contains several hapax legomenon, words that we have no certain meanings for – they
appear in this poem and nowhere else. Sometimes they are considered scribal errors and the translators suggest
emendations; sometimes, the translators suggest possible meanings.

This is the original poem:

1 Leodum is minum
swylce him mon lác gife:

willað hy hine aþecgan gif
he on þreat cymeð.

Ungelic is us.

Wulf is on iege, ic on
oþerre;

5 fæst is þæt
eglond, fenne biworpen;

sindon wælreowe
weras þær on ige:

willað hy hine
aþecgan gif he on þreat cymeð.

Ungelice is us.

Wulfes ic mines
wid-lastum wenum dogode:

10 þonne hit wæs renig weder,
ondic reotugu sæt,

þonne mec se beaducafa
bogum bilegde;

wæs me wyn to
þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað.

Wulf, min Wulf,
wena me þine

seoce gedydon,
þine seldcymas,

15 murnende mód—
nales meteliste.

Gehyrest þu,
Eadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp

bireð Wulf to
wuda.

þæt mon eaþe
tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs

uncer giedd
geador.

I am not, unfortunately, an Old English scholar. However, many such scholars have written
extensively on these lines, providing a wealth of meanings for the would-be
translator to examine. What follows are
the original lines of the poem along with a close translation, made without
concern for meter.

Leodum is minum swylce him mon lác gife:

To my people, it is as
if one gave them a lác.

The word lác is
the problem here. It is usually taken to
mean “gift.” (Baker 1994). Lác can also mean “sacrifice” or
“offering,” but it would typically take a more formal verb than gife, “give.” “Battle” has been put forward (“To my people,
it is as if one gave them battle”) but Baker claims that this is the result of
a mistranslation of a metaphor used elsewhere and wrongly applied to this poem
as well. “Game” has been suggested, but
that meaning depends upon an unlikely Old Icelandic pedigree for the word. There is an Old English word lác, and it means “gift,” and there
seems to be little reason to not use it.

willað hy hine aþecgan gif he on þreat cymeð.

They will aþecgan him if he on
þreat comes.

Aþecgan is a
conjugation of the verb “to take,” in the sense of “taking food.” This line, with only the preceding one for
context, is ambiguous – it is not beyond possibility that “my people” will be
feeding “him,” their “gift.” However,
subsequent lines make it clear that “my people” are hostile towards “him,” so aþecgan is usually translated with a
connotation of consuming – “kill” or “destroy.”

On þreat could be an adverb –
“violently.” “They will kill him if he
comes violently.” Klinck (1992) and
Baker (1996) both agree its conjugation, and the form of the verb cymeð, imply that the þreat is something concrete that “he” is
moving toward in a physical way – a troop of men.

Ungelic is us.

It is different/unalike for us.

The meaning of this line is not in question, and it is
entirely ambiguous in the original who is unalike whom. The speaker and her people? The speaker and the gift-man?

Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre;

fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen;

sindon wælreowe weras þær on ige:

Wulf is on an island I
on another;

Fast is that island by
fens surrounded;

Slaughter-cruel men are
there on the island

These lines are fairly straightforward. It is not clear which island is the fast, fen-surrounded
one. Both the speaker and Wulf are
trapped, in different ways, so it could be applied to either.

Some
commentators make a note of Wulf’s name or pseudonym. Frese (1990), in trying to build a link to a
Germanic mythic influence, claims connection to Odin’s wolves. Klinck (1992) argues that it is more likely
to refer to an outlaw status. Outlaws
could be killed without penalty, like a wolf, and so were called “wolf’s heads”
in Anglo-Saxon England.

Wælreowe almost exclusively refers to
evil and cruel men. Whoever is on the
island with Wulf is not there to help him – these are certainly not his
retainers or war-band, but enemies hunting him. Possibly, they are the speaker’s people or family, mentioned in Line 1.

willað hy hine aþecgan gif he on þreat
cymeð.

Ungelice is us.

They will kill him if
he comes to their troop

It is different/unalike for us

Lines 2-3 are repeated as a refrain here.

Wulfes ic mines wid-lastum wenum dogode:

I followed the far journeys of my Wulf in (my) hopes. (after
Klinck 1992)

I thought with hope of my Wulf’s long journey. (after Baker
1994)

Dogode is one of
the most contentious hapax legomenon
in the poem. Baker emends the word to hogode, “I thought.” Klinck argues in her articles that an important
feature of this poem is its use of “animal imagery” – words more suited to
discussing the doings of animals than humans. Unlike a few of the early commentators (e.g., Sedgefield 1931), she does
not think that any of the actors in the poem are animals – rather, that the language is specifically chosen to
give it a vicious, feral edge. She
believes dogode to be related to the
word for “dog,” much like our usage in Modern English. To dog someone is to follow him closely and
relentlessly, as a dog would.

þonne hit wæs renig
weder, ondic reotugu sæt,

Then/When/Whenever it was rainy weather and I sat wailing

þonne has an ambiguous temporal characteristic; it can mean “then,” “when”
or “whenever.”

“Reotugu” is another hapax legomenon, but it is clearly related to the verb reotain, “to lament” (Klinck 1992). It is also the first word in the poem to
clearly identify the speaker as a woman – the adjective is feminine. It is often translated as “weeping,” but reotain “speaks not of quiet grief and decorous
tears, but of wild lamentation” (Baker 1994). “Wailing” is probably closer.

þonne mec se beaducafa
bogum bilegde;

Then/When/Whenever the battle-bold man bogum
biledge

Bogum is another
contentious word in the poem. It is
typically translated as “arms.” Klinck, in her animal imagery essays, argues
that bogum are not usually found on
humans, but that the word refers to the shoulder of an animal. Bogum
is also sometimes translated as “boughs.” Biledge
comes from belecgan, “to surround.” So the sense seems to be either “held me in
his arms” or “surrounded me with branches,” perhaps a reference to a cell of
some sort.

None of the
translations I found seemed to actually use the “boughs” sense of bogum. Both Klinck and Baker see something violent or negative in the
battle-bold man’s embrace. Klinck
returns to her definition of bogum as
a shoulder or limb of an animal – the speaker is dehumanizing the man who takes
her in his arms. Baker looks to the verb
belecgnan, which he says has negative
connotations: to accuse, afflict, load
down. Subsequent lines bear out these
ideas.

wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað.

That was joy to me, to a point but that was pain also.

I had joy in that; even so, he was also an enemy (after Whitbread 1941)

Sedgefield (1931) rather gratingly translates this as “I
like it, but I liked it not (i.e., I was coy).” The violent language of the rest of the poem
does not support this. The speaker is
wailing, weighted down – not coy. Most
translations favor some variation of the first line, above. Many fail to translate the sense of to þon,“to a point.” Klinck (1992)
claims that lað can be translated as
either an adjective or a noun, and most authors prefer the noun so that it
better parallels wyn, joy, from the
first half-line. Whitbread (1941) claims
that lað should rather be “the
hostile one.” No later analysis seems to
support that view, however.

Wulf, min Wulf, wena me þine

seoce gedydon, þine seldcymas,

murnende mód— nales meteliste

Wulf, my Wulf It was
wishing for you

That made me sick; your
seldom-comings

Troubled my mind not
missing meals.

These lines are fairly straightforward. Wulf’s “seldom-comings” are likely an ironic
understatement – Wulf never comes to visit her on her island. The first half-line here, Wulf, min Wulf, is missing a syllable if
one were strictly adhering to the Old English meter.

Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer? Uncerne earne
hwelp

bireð Wulf to wuda.

Do you hear, Eadwacer? Our earne whelp

A wolf/Wulf bears to the woods.

Klinck points out that the placement of the question mark
can greatly affect the meaning of these lines. Placed after þu, it is “Do you
hear? Eadwacer, our earne whelp…” making the “whelp” clearly something belonging to the
speaker and this new character, Eadwacer. It is typically placed after Eadwacer, which makes the sense of “our”
somewhat ambiguous. It could also go at
the end of the line: “Do you hear, Eadwacer, our earne whelp?” This would
make Eadwacer the whelp. (Although asking
the whelp if he has heard that a wolf is carrying him to the woods makes little
sense.)

Eadwacer is
a name formed out of words, and usually translated as “property-watcher.” This seems to make him a guardian of the
speaker, and stands him against the (potentially) outlaw Wulf. A few try to argue that Eadwacer and Wulf are
one in the same person, and another theory posits that an “eadwacer” is some
sort of angel or spirit guide (Frese 1990). Baker argues that the word for “watcher” would be wacere, and that wacer
should be translated as “watchful,” making Eadwacer “Watchful of
Wealth/Happiness” (as happiness, property and wealth are all translations of ead) and even more likely to be a jailer
of some sort.

Earne is the last hapax legomenon. Most translators
emend it to one of three Old English words that translate as either “swift,”
“cowardly,” or “wretched.” “Swift” makes
sense only if one is taking the animal imagery to a fairly ludicrous
extreme. If the whelp belongs to the
speaker and Eadwacer, Baker prefers “cowardly,” to match the speaker’s apparent
contempt for Eadwacer. On the other
hand, if the whelp is the speaker and Wulf’s, “wretched” may be the better
fit.

þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs

uncer giedd geador.

It is easy to tear apart what
never united was:

Our giedd together

Many translators have seized upon the similarity of these
lines to Matthew 19:6 – “What God has joined together, let no man put
asunder.” The speaker may be emphasizing
that she was not married – but to whom? Is she lamenting her separation from Wulf – perhaps a lover whom she
never wed? Is Eadwacer her husband as
well as captor? Or is she mocking
Eadwacer, to whom she has never been truly united (e.g., in marriage) even if
he has possessed her physically? If so,
might Wulf be her proper husband, whose exile or outlawry keeps him away?

Tosliteð is another word that Klinck
seizes on to make her “animal imagery” arguments. It is a word that expresses a violent
parting, a slitting or cutting or tearing.

Giedd is alternately used in Old English
to indicate a poem, a story, a song, or a chant.

Alternate Interpretations

The canonical “story” of this poem, which I have followed,
is that the speaker is a woman who is in love with Wulf, but is being held
apart from him by Eadwacer. Within this
version, there is still plenty of ambiguity – to whom the speaker is married,
if either; whose whelp it is; the fate of the whelp (raised by Wulf, or torn
apart in vengeance?).

Other
critics have seen other possibilities. Early on, it was thought that this was a reference to some lost (or
known) Germanic myth cycle. Scholfield
(1902) called this poem “Signy’s Lament,” a reference to a Germanic story about
a woman whose husband kills all her family save her twin brother. Her sons will not avenge their mother, so she
seeks out her brother in disguise and conceives a child with him. She gives him the child to raise to avenge
his family’s deaths, and when her son comes to kill her husband, she elects to
die with him. Scholfield thought that
the incestuous relationship between Signy and her brother explained the joy/pain
paradox in Line 12 and the bearing away of the whelp to the woods. She and her brother were of the Wolfings, so
the pseudonym “Wulf” is also a good fit. However, Signy does not spend much time thinking on her brother after
the fact, following his far-wanderings in her hopes, and the passion with which
the speaker regards Wulf seems misplaced for a reluctant brother-sister
coupling.

Frankis
(1962) makes an interesting case for Wulf
and Eadwacer to be linked with Deor,
the poem which comes just before it in the Exeter Book and which also has a
refrain. The speaker in Deor says “My name was Deor,” but, if
one translates the word deor this could
also be “My name was an animal” – a riddling way of alluding to Wulf. If one takes the events in Deor and adds them to Wulf and Eadwacer, one gets a tale of an
illicit love affair between the king’s daughter and the king’s scop. The scop is banished and the
daughter is placed on an island under guard. She is pregnant and Lines 16-17 (“our wretched whelp/a wolf bears to the
woods”) either allude to an accomplished fact (left curiously unmentioned in Deor) or an anticipated one. This interpretation deepens rather than
conflicts with the canonical one and, while it cannot be conclusively shown
true or untrue, is of interest.

Frese
(1990) puts forward the theory that Wulf is the speaker’s dead son, and that
the poem is an elegy. Her translation is
effective, but her arguments are rather wide-ranging. In her version, “eadwacer” is some sort of
spirit guide, a Valkyrie or angel, that the speaker is imploring to guide Wulf
in the next life. It feels stretched.

Osborne
(1994) continues the mother-son theme, but proposes that the son, Wulf, is not
dead. She suggests that the speaker is a
peace-weaver, a woman of one people married to their enemies to end a
feud. Her son, Wulf, has been sent to her
people (like a gift) to learn their ways and traditions. The speaker begins the poem fearful for her son – will her people be hostile
to him, on his father’s account? Then it
shifts as she begins to fear her son
– when he returns, will it be with all her family’s old grudges against his
father’s people? In this case, the giedd being torn asunder could be the
peace between the families, and Eadwacer might be her husband or even a younger
son in whom she is confiding these fears. This version I find more plausible; however, the shift in fear occurs
suddenly at Line 16 (“Do you hear, Eadwacer?”), since she is worrying about
Wulf and his seldom-comings just before that. The sudden change makes it difficult to see this meaning naturally. Osborne motivates her interpretation on the
basis that a passionate or erotic love poem could not exist in an Anglo-Saxon
context; I think Klinck argues convincingly that it can. There are gnomic verses that condemn wives
who take secret lovers, and the Riddles certainly show an interest in sexuality. The poem can be read as Osborne suggests, but
it is less intuitive, and the reasons for doing so are dubious.

Most
recently, Tasoiulas (1996) tries to make the case that Wulf is the son of the
unmarried speaker and Eadwacer, and has been left exposed to die because of his
bastard status. This fits Wulf being
given to the speaker’s people, and the speaker’s grief, and even the whelp
being borne into the woods by a wolf. But what about “they will kill him if he comes to their troop”? An exposed infant will not “come” to anyone,
but rather lie where he is left. Since
that line is not only written, but repeated as a refrain, it has a certain
importance which I think this interpretation misses.

Translation

Unconvinced by the alternate interpretations of the poem, I
primarily followed Klinck and Baker, doing my best to fit the meanings of the
lines into the Old English rhythmic meter. When possible, I chose words with a harder edge to them, in keeping with
Klinck’s “animal imagery,” even if I could not replicate the imagery itself. For instance, in Line 11, I elected to use
“bore me in his arms” rather than use a softer word such as “embraced,” which
would have also preserved the alliteration.

I followed
the alliteration rules presented in by M. Wendy Hennequin (2005). In brief, words that start with the same
letter alliterate. “Set” and “sell”
alliterate with each other, and also with “shell,” “steak,” and “snake,” even
though the “s” sound is blended with other consonants in these cases. Also, all vowels alliterate with each other.

The stress
patterns for each half-line follow one of five major types, defined by a German
scholar named Sievers in the late nineteenth century. Alexander (1991) follows Tolkien in
describing them, and I reproduce his example here.

Type

Name

Example

A

Falling-falling

Kníghts in ármor

B

Rising-rising

The róaring séa

C

Clashing

On hígh móuntains

Da

Falling by stages

Bríght árchàngels

Db

Broken fall

Bóld brázenfàced

E

Fall and rise

Híghcrèsted hélms

Table 1: Anglo-Saxon
half-line stress patterns

“Ungelic is us” presented a problem. “Ungelic”
and “unalike” sounded similar enough that I thought to replace one with the
other; however, the stress in “unalike” is on “like,” not “un.” Despite the many vowels in the word, it does
not actually alliterate with “us.” “Unalike
it is for us” alliterates “is” with “us,” but “like” still has a stress, giving
this half-line three stressed syllables. Still, this seemed preferable to me rather than use the more standard
“It is different with us” that has no alliteration. To the ear of the audience, the alliteration
is more likely to make an impression than an additional stressed syllable in a
poem with such changeable meter.

My main
challenge came in Line 9 in dealing with the dogode/hogode debate. I
tried to combine the two senses of this line offered by Klinck and Baker as “My
thoughts and hopes far-traveled to Wulf.” This greatly changes the grammatical structure of the line – the speaker
is not thinking or following, but “far-traveling.” Wid-lastum,
“far journeys” are nouns and something Wulf has embarked upon. I have turned it into a verb and given it to
the speaker as the action of her “thoughts and hopes.” However, I think it preserves two main ideas
– first, that Wulf is distant, and second, that she is “dogging” him, at least
in her mind. Having her travel to him
keeps Klinck’s meaning with dogode;
giving her thoughts to do it with helps the meter and alliteration of the line.

The
alliteration in this line may be dodgy; I have assumed “thoughts” and
“traveled” alliterate, since they both begin in Modern English with a “t.” But the sound that begins “thoughts” would be
spelled “ð” in Old English and may
have been considered separately.

The final
half-line would not admit a solution as satisfactory as “giedd geador.” None of the
translations of giedd begin with the
“g” sound that would alliterate with the stressed syllable of the only
translation of geador,
“together.” “Song” at least has a “g”
sound at its end, and so I used it.

I have
tried my best to keep to the stress patterns in Table 1, but later poetry like Wulf and Eadwacer allows more unstressed
syllables per line, which can make determining which Sievers type a line ought
to be somewhat troublesome. (I take as
an example Line 10, þonne hit wæs renig weder, which
would seem to have three fairly strong stresses – is it “falling by stages”
with the extra unstressed syllables hitwæs between the two strong stresses þonne
and re(nig), or is it something else?)

Conclusions

Wulf and Eadwacer
is ambiguous and admits many interpretations. I have tried to adhere as closely to the original as I could. Many phrases, like Line 10, þonne
hit wæs renig weder (When it was rainy/raining weather), have obvious
modern cognates and I used these whenever I could. Sometimes, one half of a line would have
cognates but its second half would not, forcing a rewording of both to preserve
alliteration. When interpretations were
unavoidable, I looked for those which were based more on the grammar and structure
of the poem rather than assumptions on what Old English poetry could or could
not be about. The result, I believe, is
a fairly faithful translation of the original into Modern English.

One may
believe that other interpretations or senses can be had from the poem, ones
that require different language to adequately display to the modern
audience. While I agree that the modern
audience does not have all of the cultural referents to instantly grasp all
possible meanings of the work, I am unsure of the value of rewriting it to
highlight these possible meanings. One
very powerful and affecting meaning is sitting right under the surface of the
words – why should it be ignored?

The poem is
short – only 19 lines – and so well-suited for performance at a bardic circle
or other SCA venue. Indeed, one could
perform both the original Old English version and the translation and not
exceed a polite span of time. The
translation preserves the meaning of the original, some of its brutal force if
not its original animal imagery, and follows Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions
fairly well. I believe I have
accomplished my goal of making the poem accessible to a wider audience while,
at the same time, maintaining the poetic features that mark it as a product of
a particular time and place.